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The St Martin's Press
Scandal

THE FAMOUS New York firm of publishers, St Martin's
Press, which had previously published several books by David
Irving and requested him to provide jacket-puffs to promote
the works of their other authors, contracted to publish his
biography Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third Reich in April 1996.

SMP came under savage assault from the Anti-Defamation
League from February 1996, and SMP chairman Tom
McCormack, who had visited Irving in London and dined with
him over the previous years, suddenly became A Denier. SMP
dumped the book, the product of eight years' research, in an
unprecedented action of jibbering, craven, panic.

St
Martin's Press came this close to publishing a Nazi-philic
biography of Goebbels. Wasn't anybody paying
attention?

by Paul
Gray

IN THE GOOD old days, book publishers had
a pretty fair idea of what they would and would not print;
since their names, often literally, went on the finished
products, their reputations were as much at stake as those
of their authors. But once publishing transformed itself
into a business of battling behemoths, the clubby,
gentlemanly code of ethics grew harder to enforce or even,
in some minds, to justify. Do publishers still put a stamp
of approval on their books, or are they now merely
commercial conduits between writers and readers?

That question lay behind an event last week that rattled
the U.S. publishing world. After several weeks of growing
protests, St. Martin's Press announced that it had canceled
its planned release next month of British historian David
Irving's biographyGoebbels:
Mastermind of the Third Reich. St. Martin's
chairman Thomas J. McCormack denied that his house
had succumbed to "coercion," which included a swelling tide
of unfavorable press stories, criticism from the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai B'rith and, according to some employees,
telephoned death threats. Instead, McCormack said, a few of
the protesters had prompted him to take a closer look at
Irving and his book on Hitler's chief propagandist: "I at
last sat down to examine the page proofs myself."

That was a good, if belated, idea. But McCormack's claim
that nobody at St. Martin's was aware of Irving's reputation
prompted widespread incredulity. A prolific writer with a
knack for gaining access to original source material, Irving
has also been for some 20 years a notorious and very public
apologist for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. He
has said there is "not one shred of evidence" that 6 million
Jews were murdered by the Germans during World War II. In
Hitler's War (1977)
he made the somewhat contradictory argument that if there
was a Holocaust, Hitler knew nothing about it.

Of all this, McCormack insists, "we were ignorant, and to
the extent that that ignorance is a failure on our part,
then we deserve some of this heat." St. Martin's is not the
first U.S. publisher to yank a controversial book off its
list. In the most celebrated recent instance, Simon &
Schuster decided in 1990 not to release Bret Easton
Ellis' novel American Psycho after advance
reviewers complained about its voyeuristic scenes of women
being tortured. (Knopf later bought the discarded manuscript
and published it in paperback.) But the St. Martin's case is
more complex because it involves a work of nonfiction rather
than a question of artistic license. Should publishers vouch
for the accuracy of their books?

Irving
gave St. Martin's a manuscript ostensibly crammed with
facts, based on 75,000 pages of Joseph Goebbels'
previously undiscovered private diaries
(right). No editor could be
expected to double-check all this stuff, but a third-grader
should have noticed that Irving had done some tricky things
with it. First of all, his emerging thesis is that the
occasional lapses of the Third Reich can be blamed on
Goebbels rather than on Hitler. "Hitler doesn't want to hurt
anybody," Irving quotes Goebbels as writing. Maybe he wrote
this, but why should anyone, starting with Irving, believe
it?

As Goebbels unwinds, the distance between biographer and
subject grows harder to detect. In an all-too-typical
example, Irving paraphrases the content of a Goebbels speech
in 1937: "In Russia, said Goebbels, Stalin had murdered
42,000 priests; in Spain, his agents had already killed
17,000 priests and monks by February; yet the world
resounded with squawks of horror if one Jew in Germany had
his ears deservedly boxed." As a snippet of historical
prose, this passage is not only worthless but also
insidious. Why the indirect discourse? If that is what
Goebbels said, why not quote him directly? Are his figures
accurate? The nonspecialist reader, at whom Goebbels is
aimed, receives nothing here except the impression that Jews
in Nazi Germany had little to complain of except -- is this
odd conceit Goebbel's or Irving's? -- the boxing of their
ears. Imagine a biography of Jeffrey Dahmer that
discusses reasonably the dietary pros and cons of
cannibalism. That is the sort of historical insight provided
by Goebbels.

In London, Irving responded to the St. Martin's
cancellation as the maligned victim of conspiracy and
censorship. "I think that this kind of action by the
organized Jewish community can only lead to an increase in
anti-Semitism," he told TIME,
"because the general public will regard it as 'the Jews'
throwing their weight around again.'"

But the prospect of Goebbels bearing a reputable
publisher's imprint is offensive to believers of all
stripes. It is important to remember that publishers merely
reject manuscripts, which is not the same thing as banning
books, as any historian of the Third Reich should know. It
took an unconscionably long time, but St. Martin's finally
did the right thing.